Decision Meeting #9 Goal & Agenda

Background

The dial-in information for this week's meeting is here. The Decision Incubator Activity is intended to explore the use cases and design of a Decision Representation format (e.g. in XML, RDF, OWL…) available on the wiki along with its use by participants in testbed settings for experiments and exercises. Each meeting will be an opportunity to summarize progress & contributions to the wiki, review next steps and action items, and to review the current representation format.

Summary from the Last Meeting

At the last meeting (see minutes), Piotr Nowara was to join us to review his initiative to develop a Decision Ontology. Due to a mixup on the time, Piotr wasn't able to join during the regular meeting; however, his work is well summarized and available here.

Eva summarized the recent progress with the Open Linked Data use case, including a page where she has begun to consider what a decision is. There are different levels of decision-making, where some are more data focused (e.g. what earthquake was most significant based on magnitude, depth, region) and others more high-level (e.g. where should I live). The latter imply that I am going to take some action, and it may be different than what the data suggests. So we're thinking about how to support both types of decisions.

Eva add a page for Core Decision Modeling for capturing the components that are the minimum needed to record a decision. Jeff and Don commented on the opportunity to dig into this more in the context of emergency management in support of upcoming exercises and interoperability testing. Jeff asked about frameworks to support the work. Jeff also commented on the fact that the SPARQL query capability needs to be married appropriately with an inferencing capability and that the inferencing is sometimes assumed to be automatic with SPARQL, but that's not the case.

Jeff mentioned a Use Case: Metrics for Auto Assessment that he added and his progress.. The ability to quantify the metric with appropriate filtering thresholds and weighting allows the metric to be combined with others for an assessment which can be automated as a first-cut ordering of the options. The effective representation of metrics will allow them to be documented, accessible, reused and generally managed for improved understanding of how decisions were reached and for training on effective and consistent decision processing.

A final agenda item covered was best practices for basic ontology issues, including the best way to handle collections (e.g. Metrics vice Metric) and how to handle reification (e.g. the decision "question" could be represented by reference to a triple). Eva noted the following:

Collections are for instance discussed in the Collection Content ODP, however, maybe this is not what we need? What is the use case?

Goal for this Meeting

At this ninth meeting of the Decision Incubator, there are four main items on the agenda. First, we will do a brief review of status & progress of the Provenance Incubator Activity to consider how best to learn from and leverage this excellent work. Second, we will summarize an internal initiative to convert certain types of emergency management information (e.g. CAP, HAVE, sitrep) information into linked data sets (RDF) to demonstrate usefulness for querying and decision-making. Third, we will summarize any other progress on our use case modeling efforts. Fourth, we will revisit the best practices for collections and reification and see if we have a recommendation.

Agenda

The following agenda items will be discussed at the next meeting. The topic, time, summary and discussion leader are provided for each agenda item.

(0) Review of Status, Goals & Agenda Overview (5 min, Jeff)

Use of our component models will be mentioned and suggested goals for next few weeks.

Jeff will summarize what he's learned from a review of the materials available on the Provenance Incubator website. Discussion will center on both the provenance incubator as a model for incubator activities and also on the relationship between provenance and decision-making and how best we might leverage the combined work.

(2) Emergency Information as Linked Data (10 minutes, Jeff/Don)

As part of ongoing activities and to support our use cases, we'd like to suggest the benefits of having emergency management information in the form of linked data to support querying and decision-making. Jeff will provide a quick overview of the concept and discuss some next steps.

Each participant can present the latest results of exploration and investigation of modeling in support of our use cases.

(4)Best Practices for Basic Ontology Modeling Issues (10 minutes)

What are the best ways to handle collections of things and reification, for purposes of representing multiple things like metrics and options, and for handling best way to represent for example a decision "question" as a triple.